


To Slay A Dragon

by fabella



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Peter hates cages, Pining, Post-Season/Series 02, Roman is only a little monstrous, Self-Hatred, Sexual Coercion, Smoking, Swearing, Werewolves, handwaving the finale to get to the stuff after
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 17:09:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2158590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabella/pseuds/fabella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roman and Peter bring Nadia home safely, but Roman isn't done fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Slay A Dragon

So, they won. No doubt about it, of course, Roman never doubted, but _good, they won._

In the end, the dragon died like anything else died: face in the dirt. Dr. Pryce ran every test within his extensive scientific reach, and then, apparently a softy for potentially demonic children, called in favors to run more. All the results came back like the first: whatever curse lived within Nadia went the way of the dragon. 

“Go home,” Dr. Pryce said, snapping free of latex gloves. “Try not to kill anyone too important.”

Peter saluted and left to bring the car around, leaving Roman behind to bounce Nadia in his arms while Pryce hovered statically with a thin smile. 

So.

That was that.

Headlights lead the victory march through Hemlock Grove streets. Snow crunched under the tires. Peter’s long fingers guided the steering wheel absently. He hummed along to a song only he heard. Roman sat in the back with Nadia, gloves off and jacket unzipped, checking and re-checking the buckles on her car seat. Nadia wiggled and kicked her foot until Roman rubbed the top of her head. Roman caught Peter glancing at them occasionally by way of the rearview mirror, bruised blue eyes weighted by earthy concern. Roman met him look for look, shared the gaze as long as Peter could stand it. Peter _couldn’t,_ not for long. 

It was late, very late, and the clock on the dash only showed it getting later. A bubble of awareness enveloped the inside of the car. Roman might never die, but time still persisted. The invisible threads of it could be glimpsed in each flash of a street lamp on the side of Peter’s scraggly profile.

“Almost there, sweet girl,” Roman whispered to his little lady.

She offered him glowing blue eyes, puckering silently as she observed him in the still way she watched everything she favored. Roman didn’t know what her first word was or if she had spoken one. He brought his face level to hers, laid it against the chilly plastic of her seat. She fell asleep like that, watching him watch her, the shared wisdom of unnatural creatures between them.

Not long after, the motion of the car angled, then stopped.

“Here we are,” Peter said. Roman lifted his head. Peter stretched in the driver’s seat, and something, man or werewolf, cracked beneath his skin. Peter opened the door: _ding, ding, ding._ “Want me to carry her in?”

Roman shook his head. _Ding, ding, ding._

The home stood dark and square ahead of the car. No lights on. Silent like a human grave.

“Roman,” Peter said, soft. “Tell me what you need.”

Roman untangled the defensive mess of buckles and pulled his child into the messier defense of his gangly arms. Peter got out and popped the trunk, mumbling to himself. Roman carried Nadia to the door, patting his pockets until he found the house keys. Nadia was chunkier now, covered more torso space, had to be maneuvered around. Whatever the dragons had intended her fate to be, ultimately they had fed her and kept her warm. He should have killed them slower.

Roman found the keys. He unlocked the door. He went inside.

At the bottom of the stairs, Roman cradled the sleeping child close to his chest, long fingers cupping the back of her skull where the blond hairs had grown into ringlets. He tried to remember where the light switch was. Roman lifted his gaze when Peter came through the doorway and found the switch instantly, light flooding into cobwebbed corners. He had Nadia’s overnight bag on one hunched shoulder, Roman’s on the other. There was a weighted pause before Peter shut the door softly behind himself. 

Peter looked abjectly confused by Roman’s frozen attention, unsettled but not willing to commit the energy to being unsettled, a vague grimace on his face. Olivia had commented snidely on Peter’s clothing once, the unraveling threads of every shirt he owned, the travel eaten hem of every pant leg. Peter’s sturdy body hosted a wasted chance and a wasting one. Roman pressed Nadia closer, and Peter bit his lip, shuffled his feet.

“Where do you-” Peter started, quiet in a quiet room. 

“My bedroom,” Roman said. “Thanks.”

Peter tucked a tangled chunk of hair behind his ear and shrugged. Roman watched him climb the stairs slowly, knees bowed with weariness, but Peter said nothing else. Roman looked down at the child in his arms. Her mouth gaped loosely, shiny with drool. Her pale cheek pushed up where his jacket squished it. With care, he lifted her further toward his shoulder, and rubbed the pad of his thumb over the light pink mark left by the zipper until it faded to porcelain.

“Welcome home, my sweetest Princess.”

Her eyelashes fluttered, but Nadia continued to sleep.

One more fight, and Roman could rest as well.

In Roman’s bedroom, black layered in shades of black, he found Peter had laid a changing pad on the mattress. Peter smiled deliberately when he saw Roman, revealing with a magician’s flair a diaper from the side pouch of her Dora bag. He wagged it at Roman.

“She sprung a leak,” Peter said. “Better get a bucket.” 

Roman looked down, noticing for the first time that his jacket was soaked through straight to the light green shirt beneath.

“Shee-it,” Roman said.

“Shee-it,” Peter agreed. 

“Why’s it always this shirt?”

“You look better in blue,” Peter said, all fortune, then clapped his hands together. “Ok. Let me at her. I can handle the water damage while you get comfortable.” He paused while reaching out, bracelets jarred into song at the sudden lack of motion. He eyeballed Roman’s damp shirt doubtfully. “I hope I don’t regret this.”

Roman relinquished Nadia only a little reluctantly. Peter’s wrists bumped Roman’s chest as Peter separated them, four arms and a baby briefly entangled close enough to mingle smells as good as tastes before Roman stepped back, an old ache swelling in his throat. Peter waved a ringed hand at him, gold glinting, and Roman obeyed. _Yes sir, and all that._

From the top dresser drawer, Roman pulled out a concisely folded pair of dark blue sleep pants that smelled only faintly of stale wooden spaces too long closed. He left the bathroom door cracked open. It was room enough for Peter’s low tenor to creep past as he talked nonsense to Roman’s little girl, spoke rolling Romania words Roman didn’t understand, followed by buttons being unsnapped and the crack of parted velcro strips. To these sounds, Roman undressed, washed his stomach, brushed his teeth, ran a damp comb through his hair, and stepped into the loose cotton pants, leaving the drawstring untied. 

When he could no longer avoid it, Roman faced his reflection.

Pale face, big eyes, shuddering mouth. 

_If Peter leaves again_ , he thought to himself, then did not think.

A dark shadow fluttered near his peripheral vision. 

Roman pressed at his temples with spindly fingers that trembled.

For more than six months, Peter had stayed constant by his side, and he by Peter’s. Only they knew the complete darkness of a sunny sky blocked by the wings of immense bodies tumbling to the earth. 

More than once they had slept through winter nights stuffed into awkward piles the front seats of Roman’s small car. Those hushed nights of cramped limbs, shared coffee, cigarettes, and confidences: a sense of what heaven might look like to a soldier in hell. Once, Roman had struggled awake from a nightmare of dropping Nadia down an empty elevator shaft to blue lit frosted glass, white puffs of breath, and heat down his right side. He’d lifted his chin free of the itchy wool collar to see the top of Peter’s head an inch away, his greasy brown hair and dirty scalp. 

Weepy and unable to stop himself, he had pressed his tongue beyond chapped lips to Peter’s trusting temple, tasted the sharp burst of new sweat over old. While Peter twitched and slept on, Roman did as he had always wanted and sucked Peter’s dirty bangs into his mouth and forgot, just for a few sacred minutes, every awful moment of his awful life. Just this dirty watered down hope had lingered: _peter, peter, peter._ When Peter woke later, and immediately started digging through winter layers for his crumpled pack of cigarettes, Roman gave him the one from his own mouth.

Roman’s reflected self dropped his hands to the sink counter, and leaned forward until he was nearly touching the mirror glass with his nose. Close enough that his reflection blurred. Close enough to kiss. 

“Peter,” he whispered, voice a blade of air. “I will rip your fucking heart out.”

In the glass, Roman’s pupils dilated. His lips parted. His tongue grew wet.

Finding Nadia, _no, no, more than that_ , saving her, had inhabited Roman’s cells to the very spinning of his atoms since the moment she and Miranda had vanished beyond the tree line in the clutches of a true monster, leaving him and the other monsters gravity bound on the White Tower roof. After that, there had been no room left to fight the ever expanding dependence on Peter that pushed as inevitably outward as the stretching of the universe. Now, it was done. Nadia was home. The dragon was dead. Miranda was racing to the other side of the continent to escape Roman’s revenge. 

All that remained was this. 

“Are you making out with yourself again?” Peter asked, at the door.

Roman startled backward, his reflection comically wide eyed. He managed to step in a puddle of water and his foot shrieked across the wet tile. He glared at Peter when he caught himself on the side of the shower.

“Whoops,” Peter said, hands raised. He backed up, all _my bad, sorry buddy,_ but with fingers wiggling as he grinned in canine delight. If he had a tail that moment, he’d have wagged it. 

“Fuck you,” Roman said, baring his teeth. Peter laughed again, and turned away.

Roman stood to his full height and fixed the set of his pants. Peter could leave again. He could leave soon. Tomorrow. Roman pushed the hair back off his forehead. 

Nadia lay on her belly at the very top of the bed. As Roman entered the room, Peter draped a pink baby blanket over her shoulders and tapped the lamp base to put it on its dimmest setting. He placed a dark hand over her small back and patted lightly, humming. He stared at her absently, but not without love. He straightened sharply when he saw Roman standing on the other side of the bed, and change jingled somewhere in his pockets, some sort of ancient magic in every ordinary motion. 

“Still asleep?”

Peter shrugged, as usual, a little smile hidden in his beard.

“She’s probably sleeping through the night now,” Peter said. He rubbed his face, palms scrubbing facial hair. “Man, I need a smoke. And a bath.”

“Definitely a bath,” Roman said. “Two, maybe. Use soap.”

“You shit. Not that you’re wrong. So. Ok.”

Peter shifted from one foot to the other. He ducked his head and grabbed the back of his neck restlessly. Roman crossed his arms over the abscessed pang under his heart, tucking his hands into his forearms.

“Peter,” Roman said. 

“Ok,” Peter said, released his neck and raised his hands again. _My bad, my bad._ “Ok, gotta go.”

He moved to the door, leaving dirt behind on the carpet as he crossed Roman’s reach and moved beyond it, a wide space open between them. Roman flexed his fingers, squeezed his own flesh to keep from lashing out. He turned with Peter in his sights, still in orbit, still hovering.

“You know, ah, I’ve got working water,” Roman said. He waved vaguely to where Nadia rested. “Not like you haven’t been in my bed.”

Peter stopped in the open doorway, vibrated on his heels. If he stayed, they both knew it wouldn’t be like the night they had shared with Miranda, aroused and arousing but without a touch between them. The back of Peter’s beautiful head compelled Roman forward. He touched Peter’s shoulder, felt the strong heat of his shoulder blade through corduroy. Peter twitched. A cage is a cage is a cage.

“Please,” Roman said.

“Roman, you can’t just-” but Peter trailed off.

“You asked me what I needed,” Roman said. “So man up.”

Peter hesitated a moment longer before he gave a woof of breath at the challenge and tapped his knuckles on the door jamb, just once. Decision made. He toed off one muddy boot, then the other. Peter turned. Roman dropped his hand to his side. A livewire lashed crazily in Peter’s electric blue eyes. Every hair on Roman’s body reached out.

“You got any towels that don’t have blood or some fuck on them?”

Roman got the man some towels.

He waited on top of the covers while Peter showered, listened to water splash Peter’s body with his cheek cradled in his arm. He busied himself watching Nadia take one breath after another. The fabric of her cupcake patterned nightgown moved ever so slightly with each little inhale. Her hand twitched once, snatched at an ethereal figment, and Roman smiled, kissed her grasping digits.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Nothing escapes a Godfrey.”

As if in answer, Peter came into the bedroom, hair slicked back and dripping, a towel tied around his hips. Roman stayed quiet, and Peter stretched down, flicking the lamp off. In moonlight, he looked taller, dark hair and sinew folding into the black where light didn’t reach. Roman pinched his own hip. He swallowed as Peter lifted one side of the blanket and slipped silently into bed with them, wet towel and hair and all. The shadow of a tree branch moved over Peter’s face when he turned to Roman. Fabric rustled. He smelled like Roman’s shampoo, like blue glass after a storm.

“Ok?” Peter asked.

“You‘re fucking beautiful,” Roman said. He pursed his lips. “Nadia’s going to her bed.”

Peter nodded quickly, throat visibly tight. He kissed Nadia’s cheek when Roman offered her, and Roman touched the side of Peter’s mouth, the crisp give of his moustache. Roman felt the pause in Peter, animal stillness, but the trap had already shut.

“Stay here.” Roman said each word slowly, firmly. “There is no reason for you to leave.”

“Are you mindfucking me?” Peter said after a moment, eyes both white and dark.

“I don’t need to,” Roman said, but still, he moved with inhuman swiftness to put Nadia to bed, shushing her when she protested the new location. As she quieted, he checked her baby monitor for battery life and secured her door. No time to savor the moment. He had to see to Peter.

When he returned, Roman placed the baby monitor on the nightstand, again checked the battery life, then lifted the covers from Peter’s body. Peter drew in a startled breath, shrinking into the sheets, stomach concave. Roman left the blankets at the bottom of the bed. He stared at Peter’s chest hair. The gap where the towel had fallen from his thigh. His bellybutton. The skin was still damp. 

“I want you,” he told Peter, stilted. “Too much. But you know.”

“I do.”

“I never hid it from you. I’ve been completely clear.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Are you going to leave me?”

“I…” Peter shut his eyes, then opened them, this time at the ceiling. They appeared wet, like he might cry. “I‘m not sure.”

“Take off your towel.”

Peter did. He left the white cloth bunched beneath him, and his dick, semi-hard and brown against his thigh, grew fully erect while Roman watched. In slow, deliberate motions, Roman removed his pants and climbed the mattress until he was above Peter’s body, elbows and knees bracketing but not touching more than body hair. A tear escaped Peter’s damp eyes. He wiped it with an annoyed huff. Roman allowed his hands to dig into Peter’s cold, tangled hair, to clutch his scalp. He leaned, kissed the salt on Peter’s cheek, and pulled back, meeting his eyes. 

“If you leave, you can’t come back.” Peter nodded. Roman clutched his scalp harder, pulled his hair too tightly. Peter hissed. “I mean it. If you leave, don’t ever come back, because I’ll _kill_ you if you do. I love you, I’m fucking sick with it, so I’m warning you this once. I don’t want to be your murderer. Not you, too.”

Through the baby monitor, Nadia giggled in her sleep. If Roman knew her at all, and he did, she was probably making dancing sheep bleed from their eyes while they flung themselves at death above her crib.

“I hear you, Roman,” Peter said. “I know if I go, I go for good.”

_What does that mean you fucking shit_ , Roman wanted to ask, but Peter’s mouth was open slightly and Roman could see his teeth shining. The air around his mouth smelled like cigarette butts and Roman wanted inside it, so he bent, licked Peter’s bottom lip. The wet sheen of it made Roman clench his jaw, groan. He dropped quickly, aching erection and tight balls nudging for space against Peter’s. Peter grunted at the sudden weight and friction, a release in his body like the cracking of ribs. Peter finally touched him, lifted his hands to clutch Roman’s lower back, gripped hard.

“Will you fuck me?” Roman asked. “Let me sit on that big dick?”

Peter squirmed, thrust up in a tight circle. 

“Don’t be a fucking coward,” Roman said, while Peter throbbed beneath him. Roman licked his hand and slid it between them, fondled Peter’s sac. Peter arched. “No passengers to play with now. All you got is me. Do it to me.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, flopping back, hair falling to the pillow. “Yeah, c’mon, already.”

“Fuck yeah,” Roman said.

Roman propped himself on Peter’s thighs while he lubed himself up, tonguing the roof of his own mouth as he watched Peter watch him. Peter reached out, took the tube of KY and wet his own hand. He touched Roman’s thigh first, gently, then laced his slick fingers with Roman’s to move them aside. Peter fingered Roman open with purpose. None of that _one, two, and split_ bullshit, _no_ , Peter gave it to him _good_ , three fingers right up front, pressing deep and wet and hard. Peter’s rings were cold against his ass, nails too long to make it painless. Roman stuck his tongue down Peter’s throat in sloppy appreciation, held their dicks together in one hand while he palmed Peter’s stomach for balance with the other. 

“You like that,” Peter said. “Knew it.”

“Did you,” Roman wondered. 

They panted together, face to face until Roman pushed Peter’s shoulders to the bed and hunched over him, working Peter’s dick into his body. His teeth ached sweetly at their nerves. His scalp tingled. Peter hung onto Roman’s hips, hair wet with sweat instead of water, his face bare and strained while Roman threw his head back, and used Peter the way he needed to, every keening arch an answer to the suffering jean covered hard-ons of previous years, while Peter hung on, could only hang on.

When Peter came, the tendons in his neck bulged and his mouth shut tightly, flattened into an impenetrable line that bled when Roman bit at it. Roman clutched Peter’s hands to his dick and came like that on both their stomachs, earthquakes in miniature, shaking the bed and Peter both. Grateful. _So grateful_.

“You ok,” Peter said, into Roman’s hair, when Roman stayed motionless for a long time.

Peter’s dick softened and slid free. Roman sighed and rolled away, semen and lube sticky where his thighs pressed together. They hadn’t used a condom. That had been intentional intimacy. A deliberate abuse of consent to get Peter as close as possible. Roman walked naked to his dresser and patted it for a package of smokes. Peter suddenly laughed and covered his face, which made Roman arch his eyebrows while he lit a cigarette. He tossed the lighter into a shadow behind himself. 

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “Not the first fucking clue.”

Roman dropped back onto the bed over Peter’s naked chest and contemplated one brown nipple. He was currently allowed, so he poked it.

“Hey, do you grow more nipples when you wolf out?” 

“Man,” Peter said. He took the offered cigarette between fingers that shook. “You’re such a creep. No.” Peter drew at the cigarette, fingers lit orange as the tip cindered. He blew the smoke away from Roman’s face. Nice of him, Roman thought, and bit Peter’s right pectoral until Peter slapped him away. “Ouch! Son of a-”

Shrugging, Roman took the cigarette and shifted to his back. He could feel Peter’s eyes on him, but he knew the monster behind his own gaze, and puffed circles of smoke instead.

“I care about you,” Peter said, hushed, another confidence to add to their dependent universe. “I think I, I might even, well fuck, Roman, You know.”

Roman watched thin clouds of smoke revolve to the ceiling.

“You fucking better,” Roman said. And they both knew that he better.


End file.
